Category Archives: Social Media

A.I. and Our Current Rugged Landscape

In evolution, there’s something called the adaptive landscape. It’s a complex concept, but in the smallest nutshell possible, it refers to how fit species are for a particular environment. In a relatively static landscape, status quos tend to be maintained. It’s business as usual. 

But a rugged adaptive landscape —-one beset by disruption and adversity — drives evolutionary change through speciation, the introduction of new and distinct species. 

The concept is not unique to evolution. Adapting to adversity is a feature in all complex, dynamic systems. Our economy has its own version. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called them Gales of Creative Destruction.

The same is true for cultural evolution. When shit gets real, the status quo crumbles like a sandcastle at high tide. When it comes to life today and everything we know about it, we are definitely in a rugged landscape. COVID-19 might be driving us to our new future faster than we ever suspected. The question is, what does that future look like?

Homo Deus

In his follow up to his best-seller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” author Yuval Noah Harari takes a shot at predicting just that. “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” looks at what our future might be. Written well before the pandemic (in 2015) the book deals frankly with the impending irrelevance of humanity. 

The issue, according to Harari, is the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness. Once we break the link between the two, the human vessels that have traditionally carried intelligence become superfluous. 

In his book, Harari foresees two possible paths: techno-humanism and Dataism. 

Techno-humanism

In this version of our future, we humans remain essential, but not in our current form. Thanks to technology, we get an upgrade and become “super-human.”

Dataism

Alternatively, why do we need humans at all? Once intelligence becomes decoupled from human consciousness, will it simply decide that our corporeal forms are a charming but antiquated oddity and just start with a clean slate?

Our Current Landscape

Speaking of clean slates, many have been talking about the opportunity COVID-19 has presented to us to start anew. As I was writing this column, I received a press release from MIT promoting a new book “Building the New Economy,” edited by Alex Pentland. I haven’t read it yet, but based on the first two lines in the release, it certainly seems to be following this type of thinking:“With each major crisis, be it war, pandemic, or major new technology, there has been a need to reinvent the relationships between individuals, businesses, and governments. Today’s pandemic, joined with the tsunami of data, crypto and AI technologies, is such a crisis.”

We are intrigued by the idea of using the technologies we have available to us to build a societal framework less susceptible to inevitable Black Swans. But is this just an invitation to pry open Pandora’s Box and allow the future Yuval Noah Harari is warning us about?

The Debate 

Harari isn’t the only one seeing the impending doom of the human race. Elon Musk has been warning us about it for years. As we race to embrace artificial intelligence, Musk sees the biggest threat to human existence we have ever faced. 

“I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me,” warns Musk. “It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.”

There are those that pooh-pooh Musk’s alarmism, calling it much ado about nothing. Noted Harvard cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker, whose rose-colored vision of humanity’s future reliably trends up and to the right, dismissed Musk’s warnings with this: “If Elon Musk was really serious about the AI threat, he’d stop building those self-driving cars, which are the first kind of advanced AI that we’re going to see.”

In turn, Musk puts Pinker’s Pollyanna perspective down to human hubris: “This tends to plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea — which is fundamentally flawed.”

From Today Forward

This brings us back to our current adaptive landscape. It’s rugged. The peaks and valleys of our day-to-day reality are more rugged then they have ever been — at least in our lifetimes. 

We need help. And when you’re dealing with a massive threat that involves probability modeling and statistical inference, more advanced artificial intelligence is a natural place to look. 

Would we trade more invasive monitoring of our own bio-status and aggregation of that data to prevent more deaths? In a heartbeat.

Would we put our trust in algorithms that can instantly crunch vast amounts of data our own brains couldn’t possibly comprehend? We already have.

Will we even adopt connected devices constantly streaming the bits of data that define our existence to some corporate third party or government agency in return for a promise of better odds that we can extend that existence? Sign us up.

We are willingly tossing the keys to our future to the Googles, Apples, Amazons and Facebooks of the world. As much as the present may be frightening, we should consider the steps we’re taking carefully.

If we continue rushing down the path towards Yuval Noah Harari’s Dataism, we should be prepared for what we find there: “This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”

The Mother of all Mood Swings

How are you doing? 

Yes, you. 

I know how I’m doing — today, anyway. It varies day to day. It depends on the news. It depends on the weather. It depends on Trump’s Twitter stream.

Generally, I’m trying to process the abnormal with the tools I have. I don’t know precisely how you’re doing, but I suspect you’re going through your own processing with your own tools.

I do know one thing. The tools I have are pretty much the same tools you have, at least when we look at them in the broad strokes. It’s one of the surprising things about humans. We all go through some variation of the same process when we deal with life’s big events. 

Take grief and other traumatic life changes. We’re pretty predictable in how we deal with it. So predictable, in fact, that there’s a psychological model with its own acronym for it: DABDA. It’s known as the five stages of grief:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It was first introduced in 1969 by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.  

Noted American neurobiologist and author Robert Sapolsky marvels on the universality of our processing of grief in his book  “The Trouble with Testosterone”:  “Poems, paintings, symphonies by the most creative artists who ever lived, have been born out of mourning… We cry, we rage, we demand that the oceans’ waves stop, that the planets halt their movements in the sky, all because the earth will no longer be graced by the one who sang lullabies as no one else could; yet that, too, is reducible to DABDA. Why should grief be so stereotypical?”

But it’s not just bad stuff we process this way. If you look at how we process any big change, you’ll find there are pretty predictable stages we humans go through.

So why are we so predictable in how we deal with change? In general, these are all variations of the sensemaking cycle, which is how we parse the world around us. We start with a frame — an understanding of what we believe to be true — and we constantly compare this to new information we get from our environment. 

Because we are cognitively energy-efficient, we are reluctant to throw out old frames and adopt new ones, especially when those new ones are being forced upon us. It’s just the way we’re wired. 

But life change is usually a solo journey, and we rely on anchors to help us along the way. We rely on our psychoscapes, the cognitive environments in which our minds typically operate. Friends, families, favorite activities, social diversions: these are the things that we can rely on for an emotional boost, even if only temporarily.

But what if everyone is experiencing trauma at the same time? What if our normal psychoscape is no longer there? What then?

Then we enter the SNAFU zone.

SNAFU is an acronym coined in World War II:  “situation normal, all f*cked up.”  It was used to refer to a situation that is bad, but is also a normal state of affairs. 

We are talking a lot about the new normal. But here’s the thing: The new situation normal is going to be a shit show, guaranteed to be all f*cked up. And it’s going to be that way because everyone  — and I mean everyone — is going to be going through the Mother of all Mood Swings. 

First of all, although the stages of managing change may be somewhat universal, the path we take through them is anything but. Some will get stuck at the denial and anger stage and storm the state legislature with assault weapons demanding a haircut. Some are already at acceptance, trying to navigate through a world that is officially SNAFU. We are all processing the same catalyst of change, but we’re at different places in that process. 

Secondly, the psychological anchors we depend on may not be there for us. When we are going through collective stress, we tend to rely on community. We revert to our evolutionary roots of being natural herders. Without exception, the way humans have always dealt with massive waves of change is to come together with others. And this is where a pandemic that requires social distancing throws a king-sized wrench in the works. We can’t even get a hug to help us through a bad day.

As the levels of our collective stress climb, there are bound to be a lot of WTF moments. Nerves will fray and tempers will flare. We will be walking on eggshells. There will be little patience for perspectives that differ from our own. Societal divides will deepen and widen. The whole world will become moodier than a hormonal teenager. 

Finally, we have all of the above playing out in a media landscape that was already fractured to an unprecedented level going into this. All the many things that are FU in this particular SNAFU will be posted, tweeted, shared and reshared. There will be no escape from it. 

Unlike the hormonal teenager, we can’t send COVID-19 to its room.

Media’s Mea Culpa Moment

It’s hard to see when you’re stuck inside. And I’m not talking about self-isolating during a pandemic. I’m talking about our perspective of the media landscape.

The Problem with Politics

Currently, the concept of “Us vs Them” is embedded into our modern idea of politics. Populist politics, by its very nature, needs an enemy to blame. It forces you to pick sides. It creates a culture of antagonism, eroding social capital and dismantling any bipartisan trust. We are far down this path. Perhaps too far to turn back. But we have to realize that no nation or region in modern history has ever prospered in the long term by wantonly destroying social capital. There are many examples of how regionalism, xenophobia and populism have caused nations to regress. There is no example of these things leading to prosperity and long-term success. Not one. Yet this is the path we seem to have chosen.

If you look at the media, it’s politicians that are to blame for all our problems, whether they’re on the right or left. Based on most mainstream media, with its inherent, left wing bias, there is a personification of the problem, primarily in the President. “If Trump wasn’t there, things would be better.” But the problem would still persist. Much as we left leaning individuals found Obama a more palatable choice for president, the problem was here then as well. That’s how we got to where we are today.

The sad truth is, Trump didn’t cause the problem. He just capitalized on it. So we have to look elsewhere for where the problem originated. And that leads us to an uncomfortable reality. We are the problem – meaning we – the media, particularly in the U.S. But it’s hard to see that when you’re looking from the inside. So last week I changed my perspective.

Because of COVID-19, we should all be focused on the same story, perhaps for the first time in our lives. This gives us an unprecedented opportunity to compare the media landscapes against what should be a fairly objective baseline.

The Canadian Litmus Test

I’m Canadian — and for Americans, I know that living next to Canada is like having “The Simpsons'” Ned Flanders for a neighbor. We seem nice and polite, but you can’t help feeling that we’re constantly judging you. 

But Canada does offers Americans the chance to compare cultures that have much in common but with some key critical differences. It was this comparison that geographer, historian and anthropologist Jared Diamond employed in his latest book, “Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.”

“Many of Canada’s social and political practices are drastically different from those of the U.S., such as with regards to national health plans, immigration, education, prisons, and balance between community and individual interests,” he writes. ”Some problems that Americans regard as frustratingly insoluble are solved by Canadians in ways that earn widespread public support.”

As a case in point, Canada has handled COVID-19 in a notably different way. Our pandemic response has been remarkably non-partisan. For example, we have the unusual spectacle of our most Trump-like politician, Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford, stepping up as a compassionate leader who is working effectively with Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his own opposition.

The Myth of Impartial Reporting

This is not the case in the U.S. Because of America’s political divides, it can’t even agree on what should be a simple presentation of fact on the story that affects us all equally. 

A recent PEW study found that where you turn for your news will significantly impact your understanding of things like when a vaccine will be ready or whether coronavirus came about naturally. 

To check this out, I did a comparison of the three most popular U.S. news sites on April 29.

Let’s start with CNN.  Of the 28 news items featured on the home page “above the fold,” 16 had an overt left bias. The most prominent was  inflammatory, dealing with Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his blowing up at press criticism. A Biden story on the Tara Reade accusations was buried in small print links near the bottom.

Now let’s go to the other side of the spectrum: Fox News, which also featured 28 news items “above the fold.” Of these 14 had an overt right bias. Again, the headline was inflammatory, calling out Biden on the Tara Reade allegations. There was no mention of any Trump temper tantrums on the home page. 

Finally, MSNBC’s headline story was actually focused on COVID-19 and the Remdesivir trial results and had no political bias. The site only had nine news items above the fold. Four of these had a left-leaning bias. 

The home pages bore almost no resemblance to each other. You would be hard-pressed to understand that each of these sites represented the news from the same country on the same day.

Now, let’s compare with Canada’s top two news sites, CBC and Global News. 

About 60% of the stories covered were the same on both sites and given roughly the same priority. The same lead story was featured on both — about a missing Canadian military helicopter. On CBC, only one appeared to have any political bias at all and it was definitely not explicit, while none of Global’s did.

That’s in comparison to the American news sites, where over half the stories featured — and all the lead ones — were designed and written to provoke anger, pitting “us” against “them.”

Once mainstream media normalizes this antagonistic approach, it then gets shunted over to social media, where it’s stripped of context, amplified and shared. Mainstream media sets the mood of the nation, and that mood is anger. Social media then whips it into a frenzy. 

Both left- and right-wing media outlets are equally guilty. CNN’s overriding editorial tone is, “Can you believe how stupid they are?” Fox’s is, “They think you’re stupid and they’re trying to pull a fast one on you.” No wonder there is no common ground where public discourse across the political divide can begin.

Before COVID-19, perhaps we could look at this with a certain amount of resignation and even bemusement. If you’re “us” there is a certain satisfaction in vilifying “them.” But today, the stakes are too high. People are dying because of it. Somehow, the media has to turn America’s ideological landscape from a war zone into a safe space.

Our Complicated Relationship with Heroes

It’s not really surprising that we think more about heroes in times of adversity. Many of our most famous superheroes were born in the crucible of crisis: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Captain America were all created during the Great Depression or the early years of World War II.

Today, we are again craving heroes. They are fabricated out of less fantastic stuff: taxi drivers who give free rides to the airport for patients, nurses who staff the front lines of our hospitals, chefs who provide free food to essential workers and a centenarian (as of tomorrow) who is raising millions for his national health care system by walking around his garden every day.

These are ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things. They are being raised to the rank of hero thanks to the surging tides of social media.

Again, this isn’t surprising. We are still in the early stages of what, for most of us, will likely be the defining crisis of our lifetimes. We desperately need some good news.

In fact, everybody’s favorite paper salesman/CIA operative/husband of Mary Poppins — John Krasinski — has curated a weekly webcast collection of feel-good salutes to local heroes called “Some Good News.” As of the writing of this post, it had collectively racked up close to 50 million views.

Krasinski has himself become a hero by doing things like throwing a surprise virtual prom for all the grads who were derived of theirs by the pandemic, or letting a group of ER nurses take the field at an eerily empty Fenway Park.

Having heroes should be a good thing. They should inspire us to be better people  — to become heroes ourselves. Right?

Well…

It’s complicated.

On the surface of it, hero worship is probably a good thing, especially if our heroes are doing things we all could do, if we were so inclined.  “If a 99.9-year-old man can raise millions for a national health service, there must be something I can do.”

On that very theme, the Heroic Imagination Project was formed to help us all be heroes. Headed up by famed psychologist Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, HIP came out of his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. “If,” reasoned Zimbardo, “we all have the capacity to be evil, given the right circumstances, we should also all have the capacity to be heroes, again under the right circumstances.”

But there are a few hurdles between us and heroism. One of them, ironically, comes part and parcel with the very idea of hero worship.

In an extensive analysis of how superheroes reflect the American mythology of their own times, Dublin writer Sally Rooney shows how a country uses its heroes to reassure itself of its own goodness: “The superhero makes sense in times of crisis. Reducing the vast complex of nationhood into the body of an individual means periods of geopolitical turmoil can be repackaged as moments of psychological stress. In the mirror of the superhero, America is reassured of its good qualities. Physical strength is good, as is the ability to make wisecracks under pressure. Masculinity is good, and women are okay as long as they can do very high kicks while making wisecracks. Once America is on the scene, order can be restored.”

So, we use heroes as a moral baseline to make us feel better about collective selves. They can help us reaffirm our faith in our national ideologies. A picture of a nurse in scrubs silently staring down a protester demanding a haircut makes us feel that things are still OK  in the heartland of the nation. It’s a reverse adaptation of the Lake Wobegone effect: “If this person represents the best of what we (as Americans) are, then the average can’t be all that bad.”

Unfortunately, this leads right into the second hurdle, the Bystander Effect: “If something happens that demands heroic action and there are a lot of people around, surely there’s a hero in the crowd that will step forward before I have to.” Being a hero demands a certain amount of sacrifice. As long as someone else is willing to make that sacrifice, we don’t have to — but we can still feel good about ourselves by giving it a like,  or, if we’re truly motivated, sharing it on our feed.

As the greatest real-time sociological experiment in our lifetime continues to play out, we might have yet another example of an unintended consequence brought on by social media. Based on our Facebook feeds, it appears that we have more heroes than ever. That’s great, but will it encourage us or keep us from stepping up and becoming heroes ourselves?

A New Definition of Social

I am an introvert. My wife is an extrovert. Both of us have been self-isolating for about 5 weeks now.  I don’t know if our experiences are representative of introverts and extroverts as a group, but my sample size has – by necessity – been reduced to a “n” of 2. Our respective concepts of what it means to be social have been disruptively redefined, but in very different ways.

The Extro-Version

You’ve probably heard of Dunbar’s Number. It was proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar. It’s the “suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.” The number, according to Dunbar, is about 150. But that number is not an absolute. it’s a theoretical limit. Some of us can juggle way more social connections than others.

My wife’s EQ (emotional quotient) is off the charts. She has a need to stay emotionally connected to a staggering number of people. Even in normal times, she probably “checks in” with dozens of people every week. Before COVID-19, this was done face-to-face whenever possible.

Now, her empathetic heart feels an even greater need to make sure everyone is doing okay. But she has to do it through socially distanced channels. She uses text messaging a lot. But she also makes at least a few phone calls every day for those in her network who are not part of the SMS or social media universe.

She has begun using Zoom to coordinate virtual get-togethers of a number of her friends. Many in this circle are also extroverts. A fair number of them are – like my wife – Italian. You can hear them recharging their social batteries as the energy and volume escalates. It’s not cappuccino and biscotti but they are making do with what they’ve got.

Whatever the channel, it has been essential for my wife to maintain this continuum of connection.

The Intro-Version

There are memes circulating that paint the false picture that the time has finally come for us introverts. “I’ve been practicing for this my entire life,” says one. They consistently say that life in lockdown is much harder for extroverts than introverts. They even hint that we should be in introvert’s heaven. They are wrong. I am not having the time of my life.

I’m not alone. Other introverts are having trouble adjusting to a social agenda being forced upon them by their self-isolated extrovert friends and colleagues. We introverts seldom get to write the rules of social acceptability, even in a global pandemic.

If you type “Are introverts more likely” into Google, it will suggest the following ways to complete that sentence: “to be depressed”, “to be single”, “to have anxiety”, “to be alcoholic”, and “to be psychopaths”. The world is not built for introverts.

Understanding introversion vs extroversion is to understand social energy. Unlike my wife for whom social interactions act as a source of renewal, for me they are a depletion of energy. If I’m going to make the effort, it better be worth my while. A non-introvert can’t understand that. It’s often interpreted as aloofness, boredom or just being rude. It’s none of these. It’s just our batteries being run down.

Speaking for myself, I don’t think most introverts are antisocial. We’re just “differently” social. We need connections the same as extroverts. But those connections are of a certain kind. It’s true that introverts are not good at small talk. But under the right circumstances, we do love to talk. Those circumstances are just more challenging in the current situation.

Take Zoom for instance. My wife, the extrovert, and myself, the introvert, have done some Zoom meetings side by side. I have noticed a distinct difference in how we Zoom. But before I talk about that, let me set a comparative to a more typical example of an introvert’s version of hell: the dreaded neighborhood house party.

As an introvert in this scenario, I would be constantly reading body language and non-verbal cues to see if there was an opportunity to reluctantly crowbar my way into a conversation. I would only do so if the topic interested me. Even then, I would be subconsciously monitoring my audience to see if they looked bored. On the slightest sign of disinterest, I would awkwardly wind down the conversation and retreat to my corner.

It’s not that I don’t like to talk. But I much prefer sidebar one-on-one conversations. I don’t do well in environments where there is too much going on. In those scenarios, introverts tend to clam up and just listen.

Now, consider a Zoom “Happy Hour” with a number of other people. All of that non-verbal bandwidth we Introverts rely on to pick and choose where we expend our limited social energy is gone.   Although Zoom adds a video feed, it’s a very low fidelity substitute for an in-the-flesh interaction.

With all this mental picking and choosing happening in the background, you can understand why introverts are slow to jump into the conversational queue and, when we finally do, we find that someone else (probably an extrovert) has started talking first. I’m constantly being asked, “Did you say something Gord?”, at which point everyone stops talking and looks at my little Zoom cubicle, waiting for me to talk. That, my friends, is an introvert’s nightmare.

Finally, I Get the Last Word

Interestingly, neither my wife nor I are using Facebook much for connection. She has joined a few Facebook groups, one of which is a fan club for our provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. Dr. Henry has become the most beloved person in B.C.

And I’m doing what I always tell everyone else not to do; follow my Facebook newsfeed and go into self-isolated paroxysms of rage about the Pan-dumb-ic and the battle between science and stupidity.

There is one social sacrifice that both my wife and I agree on. The thing we miss most is the ability to hug those we love.

Whipped Into a Frenzy

Once again, we’re in unprecedented territory. According to the CDC – COVID-19 is the first global pandemic since the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. While Facebook was around in 2009, it certainly wasn’t as pervasive or impactful as it is today. Neither – for that matter – was H1N1 when compared to COVID-19. That would make COVID-19 the first true pandemic in the age of social media.

While we’re tallying the rapidly mounting human and economic costs of the pandemic on a day-by-day basis, there is a third type of damage to consider. There will be a cognitive cost to this as well.

So let’s begin by unpacking the psychology of a pandemic. Then we’ll add the social media lens to that.

Emotional Contagion aka “The Toilet Paper Syndrome”

Do you have toilet paper at your local store? Me neither. Why?

The short answer is that there is no rational answer. There is no disruption in the supply chain of toilet paper. If you were inclined to stock up on something to battle COVID-19, hand sanitizer would be a much better choice.  Search as you might, there is no logical reason why people should be pulling toilet paper by the pallet full out of their local Costco.

There is really only one explanation; panic is contagious. It’s called emotional contagion. And there is an evolutionary explanation for it. We evolved as herd animals and when our threats came from the environment around us, it made sense to panic when you saw your neighbor panicking. Those that were on the flanks of the herd acted as an early warning system for the rest. When you saw panic close to you, the odds were very good that you were about to be eaten, trampled or buried under a rockslide. We’re hardwired to live by the principle of “Monkey see, monkey do.”

Here’s the other thing about emotional contagion. It doesn’t work very well if you have to take time to think about it. Panicked responses to threats from your environment will only save your life if they happen instantly. Natural selection has ensured they bypass the slower and more rational processing loops of our brain.

But now let’s apply the social media lens to this. Before modern communication tools were invented, emotional contagion was limited by the constraints of physical proximity. It was the original application of social distancing. Emotions could spread to a social node linked by physical proximity, but it would seldom jump across ties to another node that was separated by distance.

Then came Facebook, a platform perfectly suited to emotional contagion. Through it, emotionally charged messages can spread like wildfire regardless of where the recipients might be – creating cascades of panic across all nodes in a social network.

Now we have cascades of panic causing – by definition – irrational responses. And that’s dangerous. As Wharton Management professor Sigal Barsade said in a recent podcast, “I would argue that emotional contagion, unless we get a hold on it, is going to greatly amplify the damage caused by COVID-19”

Why We Need to Keep Calm and Carry On

Keep Calm and Carry On – the famous slogan from World War II Britain – is more than just a platitude that looks good on a t-shirt. It’s a sound psychological strategy for survival, especially when faced with threats in a complex environment. We need to think with our whole brain and we can only do that when we’re not panicking.

Again, Dr. Barsade cautions us “One of the things we also know from the research literature is that negative emotions, particularly fear and anxiety, cause us to become very rigid in our decision-making. We’re not creative. We’re not as analytical, so we actually make worse decisions.”

Let’s again consider the Facebook Factor (in this case, Facebook being my proxy for all social media). Negative emotional messages driven by fear gets clicked and shared a lot on social media. Unfortunately, much of that messaging is – at best – factually incomplete or – at worst – a complete fabrication. A 2018 study from MIT showed that false news spreads six times faster on social media than factual information.

It gets worse. According to Pew Research, one in five Americans said that social media is their preferred source for news, surpassing newspapers. In those 18 -to 29, it was the number one source. When you consider the inherent flaws in the methodology of a voluntary questionnaire, you can bet the actual number is a lot higher.

Who Can You Trust?

Let’s assume we can stay calm. Let’s further assume we can remain rational. In order to make rational decisions, you need factual information.

Before 2016, you could generally rely on government sources to provide trustworthy information. But that was then. Now, we live in the reality distortion field that daily spews forth fabricated fiction from the Twitter account of Donald. J. Trump, aka the President of the United States.

The intentional manipulation of the truth by those we should trust has a crippling effect on our ability to respond as a cohesive and committed community. As recently as just a week and a half ago, a poll found that Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to say that COVID-19 posed an imminent threat to the U.S. By logical extension, that means that Republicans were half as likely to do something to stop the spread of the disease.

My Plan for the Pandemic

Obviously, we live in a world of social media. COVID-19 or not, there is no going back. And while I have no idea what will happen regarding the pandemic, I do have a pretty good guess how this will play out on social media. Our behaviours will be amplified through social media and there will be a bell curve of those behaviors stretching from assholes to angels. We will see the best of ourselves – and the worst – magnified through the social media lens.

Given that, here’s what I’m planning to do. One I already mentioned. I’m going to keep calm. I’m going to do my damnedest to make calm, rational decisions based on trusted information (i.e. not from social media or the President of the United States) to protect myself, my loved ones and anyone else I can.

The other plan? I’m going to reread everything from Nassam Nicholas Taleb. This is a good time for all of us to brush up on our understanding of robustness and antifragility.

The Saddest Part about Sadfishing

There’s a certain kind of post I’ve always felt uncomfortable with when I see it on Facebook. You know the ones I’m talking about — where someone volunteers excruciatingly personal information about their failing relationships, their job dissatisfaction, their struggles with personal demons. These posts make me squirm.

Part of that feeling is that, being of British descent, I deal with emotions the same way the main character’s parents are dealt with in the first 15 minutes of any Disney movie: Dispose of them quickly, so we can get on with the business at hand.

I also suspect this ultra-personal sharing  is happening in the wrong forum. So today, I’m trying to put an empirical finger on my gut feelings of unease about this particular topic.

After a little research, I found there’s a name for this kind of sharing: sadfishing. According to Wikipedia, “Sadfishing is the act of making exaggerated claims about one’s emotional problems to generate sympathy. The name is a variation on ‘catfishing.’ Sadfishing is a common reaction for someone going through a hard time, or pretending to be going through a hard time.”

My cynicism towards these posts probably sounds unnecessarily harsh. It goes against our empathetic grain. These are people who are just calling out for help. And one of the biggest issues with mental illness is the social stigma attached to it. Isn’t having the courage to reach out for help through any channel available — even social media — a good thing?

I do believe asking for help is undeniably a good thing. I wish I myself was better able to do that. It’s Facebook I have the problem with. Actually, I have a few problems with it.

It’s Complicated

Problem #1: Even if a post is a genuine request for help, the poster may not get the type of response he or she needs.

Mental Illness, personal grief and major bumps on our life’s journey are all complicated problems — and social media is a horrible place to deal with complicated problems. It’s far too shallow to contain the breadth and depth of personal adversity.

Many read a gut-wrenching, soul-scorching post (genuine or not), then leave a heart or a sad face, and move on. Within the paper-thin social protocols of Facebook, this is an acceptable response. And it’s acceptable because we have no skin in the game. That brings us to problem #2.

Empathy is Wired to Work Face-to-Face

Our humanness works best in proximity. It’s the way we’re wired.

Let’s assume someone truly needs help. If you’re physically with them and you care about them, things are going to get real very quickly. It will be a connection that happens at all possible levels and through all senses.

This will require, at a minimum, hand-holding and, more likely, hugs, tears and a staggering personal commitment  to help this person. It is not something taken or given lightly. It can be life-changing on both sides.

You can’t do it at arm’s length. And you sure as hell can’t do it through a Facebook reply.

The Post That Cried Wolf

But the biggest issue I have is that social media takes a truly genuine and admirable instinct, the simple act of helping someone, and turns it into just another example of fake news.

Not every plea for help on Facebook is exaggerated just for the sake of gaining attention, but some of them are.

Again, Facebook tends to take the less admirable parts of our character and amplify them throughout our network. So, if you tend to be narcissistic, you’re more apt to sadfish. If you have someone you know who continually reaches out through Facebook with uncomfortably personal posts of their struggles, it may be a sign of a deeper personality disorder, as noted in this post on The Conversation.

This phenomenon can create a kind of social numbness that could mask genuine requests for help. For the one sadfishing, It becomes another game that relies on generating the maximum number of social responses. Those of us on the other side quickly learn how to play the game. We minimize our personal commitment and shield ourselves against false drama.

The really sad thing about all of this is that social media has managed to turn legitimate cries for help into just more noise we have to filter through.

But What If It’s Real?

Sadfishing aside, for some people Facebook might be all they have in the way of a social lifeline. And in this case, we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If someone you know and care about has posted what you suspect is a genuine plea for help, respond as humans should: Reach out in the most personal way possible. Elevate the conversation beyond the bounds of social media by picking up the phone or visiting them in person. Create a person-to-person connection and be there for them.

The Fundamentals of an Evil Marketplace

Last week, I talked about the nature of tech companies and why this leads to them being evil. But as I said, there was an elephant in the room I didn’t touch on — and that’s the nature of the market itself. The platform-based market also has inherent characteristics that lead toward being evil.

The problem is that corporate ethics are usually based on the philosophies of Milton Friedman, an economist whose heyday was in the 1970s. Corporations are playing by a rule book that is tragically out of date.

Beware the Invisible Hand

Friedman said, “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

This is a porting over of Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory from economics to ethics: the idea that an open and free marketplace is self-regulating and, in the end, the model that is the most virtuous to the greatest number of people will take hold.

That was a philosophy born in another time, referring to a decidedly different market. Friedman’s “virtue” depends on a few traditional market conditions, idealized in the concept of a perfect market: “a market where the sellers of a product or service are free to compete fairly, and sellers and buyers have complete information.”

Inherent in Friedman’s definition of market ethics is the idea of a deliberate transaction, a value trade driven by rational thought. This is where the concept of “complete information” comes in. This information is what’s required for a rational evaluation of the value trade. When we talk about the erosion of ethics we see in tech, we quickly see that the prerequisite of a deliberate and rational transaction is missing — and with it, the conditions needed for an ethical “invisible hand.”

The other assumption in Friedman’s definition is a marketplace that encourages open and healthy competition. This gives buyers the latitude to make the choice that best aligns with their requirements.

But when we’re talking about markets that tend to trend towards evil behaviors, we have to understand that there’s a slippery slope that ends in a place far different than the one Friedman idealized.

Advertising as a Revenue Model

For developers of user-dependent networks like Google and Facebook, using advertising sales for revenue was the path of least resistance for adoption — and, once adopted by users, to profitability. It was a model co-opted from other forms of media, so everybody was familiar with it. But, in the adoption of that model, the industry took several steps away from the idea of a perfect market.

First of all, you have significantly lowered the bar required for that rational value exchange calculation. For users, there is no apparent monetary cost. Our value judgement mechanisms idle down because it doesn’t appear as if the protection they provide is needed.

In fact, the opposite happens. The reward center of our brain perceives a bargain and starts pumping the accelerator. We rush past the accept buttons to sign up, thrilled at the new capabilities and convenience we receive for free. That’s the first problem.

The second is that the minute you introduce advertising, you lose the transparency that’s part of the perfect market. There is a thick layer of obfuscation that sits between “users” and “producers.” The smoke screen is required because of the simple reality that the best interests of the user are almost never aligned with the best interests of the advertiser.

In this new marketplace, advertising is a zero-sum game. For the advertiser to win, the user has to lose. The developer of platforms hide this simple arithmetic behind a veil of secrecy and baffling language.

Products That are a Little Too Personal

The new marketplace is different in another important way: The products it deals in are unlike any products we’ve ever seen before.

The average person spends about a third of his or her time online, mostly interacting with a small handful of apps and platforms. Facebook alone accounts for almost 20% of all our waking time.

This reliance on these products reinforces our belief that we’re getting the bargain of a lifetime: All the benefits the platform provides are absolutely free to us! Of course, in the time we spend online, we are feeding these tools a constant stream of intimately personal information about ourselves.

What is lurking behind this benign facade is a troubling progression of addictiveness. Because revenue depends on advertising sales, two factors become essential to success: the attention of users, and information about them.

An offer of convenience or usefulness “for free” is the initial hook, but then it becomes essential to entice them to spend more time with the platform and also to volunteer more information about themselves. The most effective way to do this is to make them more and more dependent on the platform.

Now, you could build conscious dependency by giving users good, rational reasons to keep coming back. Or, you could build dependence subconsciously, by creating addicts. The first option is good business that follows Friedman’s philosophy. The second option is just evil. Many tech platforms — Facebook included — have chosen to go down both paths.

The New Monopolies

The final piece of Friedman’s idealized marketplace that’s missing is the concept of healthy competition. In a perfect marketplace, the buyer’s cost of switching  is minimal. You have a plethora of options to choose from, and you’re free to pursue the one best for you.

This is definitely not the case in the marketplace of online platforms and tools like Google and Facebook. Because they are dependent on advertising revenues, their survival is linked to audience retention. To this end, they have constructed virtual monopolies by ruthlessly eliminating or buying up any potential competitors.

Further, under the guise of convenience, they have imposed significant costs on those that do choose to leave. The net effect of this is that users are faced with a binary decision: Opt into the functionality and convenience offered, or opt out. There are no other choices.

Whom Do You Serve?

Friedman also said in a 1970 paper that the only social responsibility of a business is to Increase its profits. But this begs the further question, “What must be done — and for whom — to increase profits?” If it’s creating a better product so users buy more, then there is an ethical trickle-down effect that should benefit all.

But this isn’t the case if profitability is dependent on selling more advertising. Now we have to deal with an inherent ethical conflict. On one side, you have the shareholders and advertisers. On the other, you have users. As I said, for one to win, the other must lose. If we’re looking for the root of all evil, we’ll probably find it here.

A Troubling Prognostication

It’s that time of year again. My inbox is jammed with pitches from PR flacks trying to get some editorial love for their clients. In all my years of writing, I think I have actually taken the bait maybe once or twice. That is an extremely low success rate. So much for targeting.

In early January, many of the pitches offer either reviews of 2019 or predictions for 2020.  I was just about to hit the delete button on one such pitch when something jumped out at me: “The number-one marketing trend for 2020 will be CDPs: customer data platforms.”

I wasn’t surprised by that. It makes sense. I know there’s a truckload of personal data being collected from everyone and their dog. Marketers love platforms. Why wouldn’t these two things come together?

But then I thought more about it — and immediately had an anxiety attack. This is not a good thing. In fact, this is a catastrophically terrible thing. It’s right up there with climate change and populist politics as the biggest world threats that keep me up at night.

To close out 2019,  fellow Insider Maarten Albarda gave you a great guide on where not to spend your money. In that column, he said this: “Remember when connected TVs, Google Glass and the Amazon Fire Phone were going to provide break-through platforms that would force mass marketing out of the box, and into the promised land of end-to-end, personalized one-on-one marketing?”

Ah, marketing nirvana: the Promised Land! The Holy Grail of personalized marketing. A perfect, friction-free direct connection between the marketer and the consumer.

Maarten went on to say that social media is one of the channels you shouldn’t be throwing money into, saying, “It’s also true that we have yet to see a compelling case where social media played a significant role in the establishment or continued success of a brand or service.”

I’m not sure I agree with this, though I admit I don’t have the empirical data to back up my opinion. But I do have another, darker reason why we should shut off the taps providing the flow of revenue to the usual social suspects. Social media based on an advertising revenue model is a cancerous growth — and we have to shut off its blood flow.

Personalized one-to-one marketing — that Promised Land —  cannot exist without a consistent and premeditated attack on our privacy. It comes at a price we should not be prepared to pay.

It depends on us trusting profit-driven corporations that have proven again and again that they shouldn’t be trusted. It is fueled by our darkest and least admirable motives.

The ecosystem that is required to enable one-to-one marketing is a cesspool of abuse and greed. In a pristine world of marketing with players who sport shiny ideals and rock-solid ethics, maybe it would be okay. Maybe. Personally, I wouldn’t take that bet. But in the world we actually live and work in, it’s a sure recipe for disaster.

To see just how subversive data-driven marketing can get, read “Mindf*ck” by Christopher Wylie. If that name sounds vaguely familiar to you, let me jog your memory. Wylie is the whistleblower who first exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal. An openly gay, liberal, pink-haired Canadian, he seems an unlikely candidate to be the architect of the data-driven “Mindf*ck” machine that drove Trump into office and the Brexit vote over the 50% threshold.

Wylie admits to being blinded by the tantalizing possibilities of what he was working on at Cambridge Analytica: “Every day, I overlooked, ignored, or explained away warning signs. With so much intellectual freedom, and with scholars from the world’s leading universities telling me we were on the cusp of ‘revolutionizing’ social science, I had gotten greedy, ignoring the dark side of what we were doing.”

But Wylie is more than a whistleblower. He’s a surprisingly adept writer who has a firm grasp on not just the technical aspects, but also the psychology behind the weaponization of data. If venture capitalist Roger McNamee’s tell-all expose of Facebook, “Zucked,”  kept you up at night, “Mindf*ck” will give you screaming night terrors.

I usually hold off jumping on the year-end prognostication bandwagon, because I’ve always felt it’s a mug’s game. I would like to think that 2020 will be the year when the world becomes “woke” to the threat of profit-driven data abuse — but based on our collective track record of ignoring inconvenient truths, I’m not holding my breath.

‘Twas the Night Before the Internet

Today, just one day before Christmas, my mind swings to the serendipitous side. I don’t know about you, but for me, 2019 has been a trying year. While you would never know it by the collection of columns I’ve produced over the past 12 months, I have tried to find the glimpses of light in the glowering darkness.

Serendipity Sidetrack #1: “Glowering” is a word we don’t use much anymore. It refers to someone who has a dark, angry expression on their faces. As such, it’s pretty timely and relevant. You’d think we would use it more.

One of my personal traditions during the holidays is to catch one of the fourteen billion airings of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Yes, it’s quintessentially Capraesque. Yes, it’s corny as hell. But give me a big seasonal heaping helping of Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed and that “crummy little town” known as Bedford Falls.

Serendipity Sidetrack #2: The movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” is based on a 1939 short story by Philip Van Doren Stern. He tried to get it published for several years with no success. He finally self-published it and sent it to 200 friends as a 24-page Christmas card. One of these cards ended up on the desk of an executive at RKO pictures, who convinced the studio to buy the rights in 1943 as a vehicle for its star Cary Grant.

That movie never got made and the project was shelved for the rest of World War II. After the war, director Frank Capra read the script and chose it as his first Hollywood movie after making war documentaries and training films.

The movie was panned by critics and ignored by audiences. It was a financial disaster, eventually leading to the collapse of Capra’s new production company, Liberty Films. One other stray tidbit: during the scene at the high school dance where the gym floor opens over the pool (which was shot at Beverly Hills High School), Mary’s obnoxious date Freddie is played by an adult Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, from the “Our Gang” series.

But I digress. This seasonal ritual got me thinking along “what if” lines. We learn what Bedford Falls would be like if George Bailey was never born. But maybe the same narrative machinery could be applied to another example: What would Christmas (or your seasonal celebration of choice) be like if the Internet had never happened?

As I pondered this, I realized that there’s really only one aspect of the internet that materially impacts what the holidays have become. These celebrations revolve around families, so if we were going to look for changes wrought by technology, we have to look at the structure and dynamics of the family unit.

Serendipity Sidetrack #3: Christmas was originally not a family-based celebration. It became so in Victorian England thanks to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and Charles Dickens. After the marriage of the royal couple, Albert brought the German tradition of the Christmas tree to Windsor Castle. Pictures of the royals celebrating with family around the tree firmly shifted the holiday towards its present warm-hearted family center.

In 1843, Dickens added social consciousness to the party with the publication of “A Christmas Carol.” The holiday didn’t take its detour towards overt consumerism until the prosperity of the 1950s.

But back to my rapidly unraveling narrative thread: What would Christmas be like without the Internet?

I have celebrated Christmas in two different contexts: The first, in my childhood and the second with my own wife and family.

I grew up with just my immediate family in rural Alberta, geographically distant from aunts, uncles and cousins. For dinner there would be six of us around the table. We might try to call an aunt or uncle who lived some 2,000 miles away, but usually the phone lines were so busy we couldn’t get through.

The day was spent with each other and usually involved a few card games, a brief but brisk walk and getting ready for Christmas dinner. It was low-key, but I still have many fond memories of my childhood Christmases.

Then I got married. My wife, who is Italian, has dozens and dozens and dozens of relatives within a stone’s throw in any direction. For us, Christmas is now a progressive exercise to see just how many people can be crammed into the same home. It begins at our house for Christmas morning with the “immediate” family (remember, I use the term in its Italian context). The head count varies between 18 and 22 people.

Then, we move to Christmas dinner with the “extended” family. The challenge here is finding a house big enough, because we are now talking 50 to 75 people. It’s loud, it’s chaotic — and I couldn’t imagine Christmas any other way.

The point here is how the Internet has shifted the nature of the celebration. In my lifespan, I have seen two big shifts, both to do with the nature of our personal connections. And like most things with technology, one has been wonderful while the other has been troubling.

First of all, thanks to the Internet, we can extend our family celebrations beyond the limits of geography. I can now connect with family members who don’t live in the same town.

But, ironically, the same technology has been eroding the bonds we have with the family we are physically present with. We may be in the same room, but our minds are elsewhere, preoccupied with the ever-present screens in our pockets or purses. In my pre-Internet memories of Christmas, we were fully there with our families. Now, this is rarely the case.

And one last thought. I find — sadly — that Christmas is just one more occasion to be shared through social media. For some of us, it’s not so much who we’re with or what we’re doing, but about how it will look in our Instagram post.